19 March 2008

Early retirement makes you live longer? Or kills you? Who knows?

"Staying on the job five extra years lowers your risk of dying by ten percent." -- on a local TV newscast.

The point here is that early retirement causes one to die earlier, even if you're healthy. That seems believable.

But we all have, of course, a one hundred percent risk of dying.

Presumably they meant that it lowers the risk of dying by ten percent per year. I don't want to try to get more data from that, though, because even that's a big assumption; the numbers in this context might be meaningless.

What I would want is a statement of the form "staying on the job five extra years raises your life expectancy by X years". (For what it's worth, a bit of poking around the internet doesn't give a value for X, but does give the impression that some people think X is negative.)

What about the converse? Say you've got a job that lets you retire on paper (let's call it "emeritus") at 65, but you can still hang around and work with even less demands on you into your 70s? Oh, and you get to wear silly hats when the weather is bad too.